Category: nonfiction

Language and Writing

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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The Japanese edition of The Fall of Language in the Age of English
This is the Japanese edition. I am reading the English translation, not this version.

One of the (many) reasons to browse bookstores is that you stumble across books that you never heard of and would not have known to look for because it would never have occurred to you that you wanted to read a book about that particular thing until you stumbled across it.

Right now my morning book is one that fits that description. It’s called The Fall of Language in the Age of English, by Japanese writer Minae Mizumura (translated by Mari Yoshihara and Juliet Winters Carpenter). I’m sure I bought it at East Bay Booksellers, because they sell a lot of small press and academic books and are a very likely place to run across the books you didn’t know you wanted until you picked them up.

I’m not 100% sure I bought it there because I’ve had it awhile and just got around to reading it. (Yes, I do that all the time. Doesn’t everybody?) It is a perfect book for my daily reading practice, which requires books that are best read a few pages at a time because they give you something to chew on.

(I should note that this daily practice of reading for about 15 minutes in the morning is far from the only reading I do. It is in a way of reading akin to meditation, which is very different from diving into the world of a novel.)

This book is about writing in national languages (and what constitutes a national language) when so much of the world’s written work is written and published in English, which is a universal language in much the same way that Latin was a few centuries back. But it makes its points slowly, clearly discussing important points along the way.

The whole book is fascinating, but here’s the concept that got to me on a personal and gut level as a writer:

The first prerequisite for fine literature is that the writer must see the language not as a transparent medium for self-expression or the representation of reality, but as a medium one must struggle with to make it do one’s bidding.

This, I think, is the essence of being a writer, the combination of having something you want to convey – be it a story, a philosophical approach, an understanding of the world – and struggling to find the right words for expressing it.

(The term “fine literature” makes me, as a science fiction writer, uneasy, since it is often used to exclude many pieces of writing I consider very fine indeed, but I define it more broadly as work that aspires to more than basic communication.)

This is in no way the same as learning how to apply the rules of grammar, though understanding them is one of the underpinnings of writing. It does, however, require a deep and abiding familiarity with the written language you use.

You certainly cannot write effectively in a language unless you have read in it deeply and thoroughly. Continue reading “Language and Writing”…

Books

personby Gillian Polack
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I have 2 posts for you in the same day because this week is suddenly impossibly different. I wrote the prior post before the massacre and am spending my whole Chanukah dealing with consequences for myself and friends. My Baltimore nephew just checked in on me and I never would have thought that, with US shootings, it would be he who had to check in on me.

If you need to understand what happened, ask me, and I’ll post more next Monday. In the interim, I’m seeing a total lack of knowledge about Jewish Australia. Loads of generic good wishes and concern for safety, and some friends write to me directly and most put general statements on FB and don’t think that, just maybe, every single Jewish Australian is in mourning. Some people are full of theories about the role of Israel and want to share their theory without stopping to say, first, that they’re sorry that so many people were murdered and they mourn with us. Their thoughts count more than the humans caught up in this mess. This is what happened here when we heard about the Tree of Life stuff from 2018. I have a friend who goes to that shul and I was there for her then and she’s there for me now and it’s all so wrong. We should be complaining about the weather, not worried about getting safely through the week.

Even the least antisemitic non-Jewish Australians other Jews. American friends help. I wish the reasons for you understanding were not so full of hurt, but I’m grateful to every single one of you who reaches out to me.

How do we handle this? For me, books always help. I posted about this on Facebook – I thought I’d copy my post for you here. maybe books help you, too. After all, Jewish Australia is very, very different to Jewish America. For one thing, we think we’re much wittier and we like our spelling more and… Australian Rules Football. (The footie is an argument in itself – ask me why sometime)

From FB, but with more notes):

Jewish Australia is in the news for the worst possible reason and it might help some people if they know who we are. Jewish Australians may not be many, but our culture is diverse and very Australian. I thought you might like some books to understand a bit better. I’ve included one of my novels, because it’s specifically about Sydney Jews and so that you can have a novel to read if the others are too much right now. It’s safer: the protagonist merely discovered she has Jew cooties – having Jew cooties was much less scary back then.

Apple, Raymond. The Great Synagogue: A History of Sydney’s Big Shule (one of the most important synagogues in the country, and definitely the most important Modern Australian Orthodox synagogue in Sydney, often targeted by marchers who claim they’re not bigots – not yet bombed – the recently-bombed synagogues were in Melbourne)
Baker, Mark The Fiftieth Gate (Mark was an historian, just ahead of me at university. Australia has/had per capita, the biggest Holocaust survivor population outside Israel and one of these survivors was murdered on Sunday. Mark had to deal with those issues as an historian and also a child of survivors. This is that book.)
Gawenda, Michael My Life as a Jew (very recent. Michael was the editor of a major newspaper and so experienced antisemitism quite differently to most of us. He was born in a displacement camp.)
Kofman, Lee and Tamar Paluch Ruptured (a new anthology that shows the path Jewish women walked in the time after October 7.)
Polack, Gillian The Wizardry of Jewish Women (I’ve written far more Jewish things than this, but this is a novel exploring Jewish Australia from the view of someone who nearly lost all their Jewish past. What’s important about it here, is that Judith’s friends are all people from the Left who would not even talk to her now. I’m exploring this a little in short stories, which my Patreon folk have been reading. When I have enough, I’ll think about a story collection. I’m only 2 stories away from enough.)
Rutland, Suzanne The Jews in Australia (the standard history, dated but a very handy introduction)
Sackville-O’Donnell, Judith The first Fagin: the true story of Ikey Solomon (This is a fun way of discovering what’s now Tasmania’s early Jewish population. The differences between Fagin and the guy who inspired him are immense and tell a lot about antisemitism and how it warps things.)
Zable, Arnold Jewels and Ashes (And Aussie classic, all about the last days of a family in Bialystock. Arnold is one of our best story tellers and helped me understand why my grandfather wouldn’t talk about his childhood nor his lost family. His father brought him to Australia in 1917 or 1918, and 35 years later there was no family in Poland at all. Arnold was the last family connection to leave. His family was on a boat on the way here and were banned from entry because Australia had put up fences to keep jews out. Arnold’s family managed to be accepted in New Zealand and they moved here later. In the book, Feivel is the one who married my mother’s cousin. 120,000 people is not a lot, but it’s an enormous number compared with the hundreds in Australia prior to 1810 or the thousands in most of the 19th century. Older families are very interconnected, which is why I have so many links with the authors of these books. I don’t have the same links with post 1950s arrivals – we’re a complex bunch.)

If you want more, try here: Australian Jewish Writers Database | Jewish Australia It’s not updated frequently and it’s not complete, but it gives you a sense of the range of Jewish voices in Australia. You won’t hear most of those voices at Australian literary conventions. I’d love to see suggestions for other books that talk about Jewish Australia.
We’re not a big community, and we only go back to 1788, but there are lots of connections between this group or that group. Some other writers have no idea I exist, while others have known me or my family forever. Through my family, I am connected to several other writers. Some of them have met me but are unlikely to remember me. My favourite example of this is Michael Gawenda. His sister married my uncle and Michael and I sat on the same table at my cousins barmie. Arnold Zable is another example. His most famous book includes relatives of mine. And one conference of the HNSA I found myself next to one of my favourite children’s writers… who turned out to be my aunt’s best friend. Others were connected through school or university: Mark Baker was just ahead of me at university, while Raymond Apple went to Sunday school with my mother when I asked him. He was my rabbi when I lived in Sydney.
How does this play out everyday? We catch up a bit when we see each other, or we do introductions from scratch because we didn’t know each other well as it was 20 years since last time, or (and this one happened to me recently) the usual checks on “Are we related” can turn into something hurtful.
One of the reasons Jewish Australians know each other is because we have a kind of verbal code to find out connections. We talk about relatives and their experiences past and present – this also works with almost anyone with a military background and, entertainingly, with the very far left – or it used to, when they would chat with me. One New Year’s Eve I was sitting with a member of the Communist Party of Australia and we chatted happily for ages because “You’re A’s cousin!” When someone has not had a traditional upbringing, they don’t know this and much hurt can ensue. This is a more recent phenomenon, and most arises when someone from the left needs the right shibboleths said to accept that I’m an acceptable Jew to talk to.

Anyhow, if you want to read more books or want to learn specific aspects of Australian Jewishness, just ask. Books help. Questions and answers help even more.

 

History and fiction and time out from hate

personby Gillian Polack
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I found my missing post. Here it is!

I logged in, expecting to tell you how the hate in Australia (which began as antisemitism and is now extending) is so tightly focused that your best friend might be bullied and you might not see it. When I’m alone, that bullying eats up a chunk of my day each and every day. This last week, however, it was less than a minute of each day and it was not every day. I was able to talk work with colleagues. When I sat down here, it struck me that I don’t often talk about that side of my life.

I used to. I used to be the kind of irrepressible historian who got excited for everyone. I’m still that historian. I don’t get to talk about it so often, is all.

Instead of dwelling on the bad side of life, then, let me find one page of notes from one day of the conference (one in forty-five pages of notes from the conference) so that you can enjoy history with me. We all need time out from hate, after all and every single US reader here had a lot more trouble to handle in the every day.

Some of you know that one of my novels (Poison and Light) is about how future humans use the past to hide from a present they found uncomfortable. Right now, a group of Australian scholars is examining how people in Early Modern England (and elsewhere, but the papers I heard were on Early Modern England) use history to imagine the future. The discussion was wide-ranging. They talked about witches and about ghosts, about predicting disaster and about what happened when the disaster failed to occur, about pamphlets and politics and poetry. It was the perfect panel for fiction writers and an exceptionally strong example of why fiction writers should get to know Medievalists and Early Modern scholars. Every other minute I thought of a writer who should have been there, asking questions about the ghosts and about the politics. The worlds they explain and the concepts they explore help us understand what we write and help us write it the best we can.

How does this understanding work in practice? My notes have an outline describing how the chair (and the head of the research project, who of course I talked to afterwards and of course we’ve planned to meet to talk about the science fiction side of things) breaks down the concepts of Imagining the Future into categories that can be explained.

She spoke about writing that give models of temporality: utopias, dystopias, and the mundane. Think about how these categories fit modern science fiction. Poison and Light is half-dystopia and half mundane, because all of my fiction talks about the lives of individuals and so the mundane is important to them. China Mieville (to my mind) writes dystopias and so does Sheri S Tepper.

But who writes utopias? I can think of earlier writers, like Sir Julius Vogel. Help me out! Who is writing now and has written a utopia that brings history into the future? We were given the theory of Star Trek, because it claims to be in a perfected future (at least for humans) but the reality of Star Trek is not utopian. Star Wars is, however, dystopian. It’s much easier to find examples when one looks to television. But I want to talk about novels!

She then moved to scales of temporality, whether the novel is set near (Earth!) or far away (Poison and Light again, since it’s in a solar system far far away – I may have attended the conference as an historian, but during this panel I felt so seen as a writer). With TV, my mind goes straight to the Jon Pertwee years of Doctor Who and compares them with (of course) Star Wars … again.

Why is the near and far important? Because so much of historical writing is used to discuss this apocalypse, or that. How far is apocalypse from our everyday? Much further, if it’s not on Earth. And here Poison and Light fails. It’s set far away, but Earth faces apocalypse while the people on New Ceres pretend they live in the eighteenth century. (I’m seeing this now with the lucky souls who are not enmired in hate – they are the people on New Ceres, while most of us are, alas, on Earth.)

I keep thinking that this whole project can help me understand my own New Ceres universe. I’m writing a second novel set on Earth next year, where the 14th century and the 17th century and how we deal with post-apocalypse join the party. My project echoes the ideas of people hundreds of years ago as humanity faces a bleak present. Where some people find refuge in fancy dress, others find refuge in explaining the world through ghosts and looking at neighbours as if they themselves are the catastrophe.

The last category asks whose future it is. Is it personal and everyday? Is it national? Is it a global future (my New Ceres again), a human one… or is it post-human.

The experts were historians and literary historians and most of the examples (by a long, long way most of the examples) belong to our past. The categories were however, really handy for questioning and understanding science fiction. And now you know why I will not give up that side of my life. I have learned so much in such a short time, and my fiction benefits.

Every time universities lose these experts, we lose the benefit of their thought and learning… and our everyday suffers.

Let me go away and think about what our lives would be like if we didn’t have these little injections of learning to help us tell better stories. No, let me not. Let me go away and write more fiction, celebrating the worlds of both historians and writers.

Sleep Grade

personby Madeleine Robins
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I hit 90 last night! But I don’t know why.

Okay, lemme explain.

Six or seven years ago I got a Fitbit for Christmas. Not one of the fancy ones–mostly what I wanted was a wearable pedometer. But by the time I adopted the technology, my Fitbit would tell me all sorts of things about my heart rate, my exercise level, my oxygenation, and yes, my sleep. And I got the Fitbit at about the same time that I began to look at the correlation between sleep and brain health, especially in later life. And six years ago, my sleep scores were… not stellar. Fitbit grades on a 1-100 scale, based on time spent awake and asleep, time spent in each sleep stage (light, deep, REM and awake… which I would not have thought was a sleep stage, but there you go), movement during sleep, and sleeping heart rate. I don’t think I’ve ever gone below 60; the 70s are “fair,” and the 80s are “good.”

If families have mythologies of their own (they do) one of the roles I played, and was weirdly proud of, was “the last person to turn out her light.” This probably grew out of my childhood difficulty in going to sleep–once I was broken of thumb-sucking, anyway. Most nights I would crawl out of bed and sit in the window of my bedroom to read by the streetlight–until my mother discovered that I was ruining my eyes this way. At that point she said “Okay, read until you’re tired, then turn out your own (subvocalized) **damn** light.” From that point on, I usually read until midnight, even as late as 2am. Given that I had to be up at 7 or for to school, I don’t know how I survived. But I did. In fact, throughout most of my adult life I got by on 5-6 hours of sleep a night (with occasional weekend sleep orgies of 10 hours… and that ended when I had kids who wanted my attention regardless of what I wanted).

This, I now know, is not healthy. So for the last six years I have been working on a conversion of manners: I now go to bed around 10pm most nights, read for a while, and (if all goes well) am asleep by 11.  Over those last six years I have trained myself to fall asleep faster–breathing techniques, lavender pillows, temperature checks, light-blocking curtains, no screens before bed, reading soporific material–you name it, I’ve tried it. I have worked out a system of sorts, and I am pleased to say that my sleep scores are now almost always in the 80s. Sometimes even in the upper 80s.

But last night I hit 90. Excellent.

I feel like I should get an award. If I could figure out what I did last night to attain excellence I would do it every night. So I checked the statistics.

Last night slept for 7 hours and 13 minutes. I was awake for a total of 31 minutes in tiny increments. I had an hour and 51 minutes of REM sleep. I totaled 4 hours and 22 minutes of light sleep, and 59 minutes of deep sleep. My oxygen variation was low, and my sleeping heart rate was 59. Fitbit only detected movement during 2% of my sleep. That accounts for a 90.

A week or so ago, I slept for 7 hours and 14 minutes.  I was awake for 17 minutes, clocked an hour and 27 minutes of REM sleep, 5 hours and 3 minutes of light sleep, and 44 minutes of deep sleep. My oxygen variation was low, but my sleeping heart rate was 69! And I was restless about 5% of the night. My score for that not-terribly-different night? 83.

So what do I learn from all this? A lot of the things that affect my sleep I cannot directly influence. How often I’m awake seems to be a function of whether I’m comfortable, and while I strive to be, obviously in the middle of the night sometimes I’m not. Maybe I’m thinking too much. I cannot, as far as I know, control the quantity of REM sleep I get. Or my sleeping heart rate. Dammit, there are too many variables.

I will note that yesterday we went to see a screening of the Stephen Sondheim musical Merrily We Roll Along (it’s terrific) and I know that the music inserted itself into my dreams. Maybe the secret to upping my sleep score is musical theatre?

Stranger things have happened.

 

Melbourne

personby Gillian Polack
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While you read this, I will be Medievalisting in Melbourne. Monday is my recovery day, so I’m seeing friends and family Tuesday I have in-service training which basically means really good behind the scenes tours at a major library and a major art gallery. Wednesday to Friday is the conference proper. My paper is written, my slides are almost there* and I don’t feel at all ready for any of it.

I’ll report back next week! There may be pictures, or there may not. It depends…

It’s rare that I can visit any campus these days, because I’m Jewish, but a friend has given me her phone number and the security number and, hopefully, all will be well.

 

  • My cutest slide is of the word ‘ritter’ scratched on a slate in Hebrew characters. I am so dreaming of writing a story where a Medieval Jewish school boy dreams of becoming a knight. If you want to see this picture, let me know, and I’ll share it when I’m at my own desk.

AI Flattery

personby Madeleine Robins
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For a few months now I’ve been getting odd emails. They start out reading like fan mail, and fan mail from some unusually perceptive reader who gets exactly what I’m trying to do. Flattering (and yes, I am not above being flattered, being just another pixel-stained techno-peasant working in the fields of fiction). So I am flattered for the first two to four paragraphs.

And then it becomes clear that these are sales pitches.

The first one I received was for Petty Treason, and mentioned the characters and the plot the the sense of place, and seemed to get what I was trying to do with the book, and to appreciate it. “Why don’t more people know this book?” she asked–a fine question, although of course with the number of books out there, how does anyone have the chance to find a book except through serendipity and marketing? And it turned out that the author of the letter was pitching her marketing services. As I was, at that time, in the process of re-issuing all three of my Sarah Tolerance mysteries (of which Petty Treason is the second) I was intrigued. I loathe marketing chores, and would have been willing to throw a bit of money to someone who would take on the task. So I wrote back, asking what she had in mind.

We exchanged two or three more emails, with proposed programs and low-cost, medium cost, and wotthehell let’s have it all cost options (no actual numbers were given). So I wrote back to find out what was included in each of the programs, and what the price tag was, and then… she vanished. Ghosted me.

Meanwhile, back at my inbox, I’d gotten another such email, effusive and flattering about Sold for Endless Rue, my retelling of Rapunzel. The writer called out the research (of which I’d done a ton, and it’s nice to have it noticed, see above re: being flattered) and the characters and the feminist underpinnings of the story. This time the sender wasn’t in marketing, but “managed” a group of 2000 avid readers who would positively swoon over my book, and write reviews in all the places that reviews get written and posted. But by this time my spider sense was tingling and I began to doubt that there was an actual human at the other end of the emails.

Why? The language of the approach emails is very polished, but more sales oriented than pure fan mail (I mean, “It’s rare to find historical fiction that feels both so authentically of its time and yet so urgently relevant today…”. Really?) And the emails focused on the things in the books that I was proudest of. And I began to imagine the person at the other end of the emails saying “Hey ChatGPT!” (Or Claude, or Grok, or whatever) “Write a marketing-approach letter that the author of Petty Treason will find hard to resist!”

“Ah!” my less cynical side murmured. “But how would ChatGPT/Claude/Grok know anything about Petty Treason and its author?”

And my increasingly sour side responded, Because Petty Treason and Sold for Endless Rue and The Stone War and Point of Honour (for all of which I have now received similar approach emails) were all scraped and used for Large Language Model training for AIs. As are all sorts of reviews and literary analyses and suchlike. I know this because I’m one of thousands of authors whose work is part of the Anthropic settlement (the first in a series of cases where the Authors Guild and other organizations have filed suit against AI companies that carelessly used other people’s intellectual property because it was there and they could).

So now these emails go into the trash. I’m not the only one who’s getting them–John Scalzi mentioned getting several a day, and if there is anyone who doesn’t need to pay for “a managed group of 2000 dedicated readers” to write reviews of his work, it’s Scalzi.

Tuesday is but a bowl of cherries, or a horse race, or an election.

personby Gillian Polack
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I am late, even for the US timezones. It’s still Monday in Hawaii, though, so I shall consider this post not too late. My reason is one that I find hilarious, every single time it happens. The US has elections the first Tuesday in November… Australia has a horse race. I usually write my posts for US time, which means often it’s Tuesday my time and today… I forgot. Last night I knew I had to write it, but things happened last night and I went to bed thinking “What haven’t I done?” And then I ate strawberries and cherries and chocolate with friends, as I do every year and turned home and made dinner and then realised I had nearly missed Monday. The cherries are important, because they are new season’s, just in time for the first time we normally eat them, which is the first Tuesday in November.

This fits with my current thoughts. I’m trying to work out why, right now, so many of us do not see the lives of others. We place our own life or our own assumptions about their lives onto the life we think they have. This does not actually help get rid of the really nasty bigotry I see in the world. I need to think more about the paths we walk and how to remember to look over and see and respectfully appreciate the paths of others. When I do, I may post about it. What I want to do is write a book, but the reason I keep being late and forgetting time is ME/CFS and I’m rather lucky I finished both my thesis and the last book before my current relapse, because it’s more severe than it’s been for a while. I can do more than I thought, but writing a whole new book from scratch is currently not possible.

What is even more fun than being publicly Jewish in a country that is lapsing into extreme racism? Being publicly Jewish with chronic fatigue.

Expect some of this to appear in my next novel… when the fatigue is sufficiently diminished to finish it. My brain is working on it even when my body can’t, so that piece of writing is still happening, just not on paper yet.

Since most of you who read this blog are from the US, I want to wish you the very best with your Tuesday elections. Every Melbourne Cup I want to talk about how elections and horse races are so similar and yet so different, but not this year. This year you have enough to deal with. You do not need additional bad jokes. Good luck!

World building and living in difficult times

personby Gillian Polack
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Some weeks the world is so full of pain that it’s difficult to write something small and sensible.

I used to deal with such things by inviting friends to dinner. I love cooking and chatting and it was the perfect solution. In Australia right now, it’s only the perfect solution for someone who is close within the Jewish community. I am not this person, although I sued to be. That’s another story.

So many of my friends say “Sorry, too busy,” or “Next time.” Add that to my illnesses arguing with each other (a squabbling family, with no respect for their physical host) and I need a different way through. My US friends are often dealing with much worse – Australia’s antisemitism might be pretty cruel, but as long as I don’t go out much, it’s safe, and Albo is not good news but compared with the US President, he’s goodness personified. I’m caught in a strange little bind.

A friend explained that this whole thing felt pretty much like the first two years of COVID. That was my breakthrough moment. My illnesses meant that I saw no-one during COVID unless they were delivering things. Compared with that first two years, I live in a whirligig and leave my flat once a week, sometimes twice! I have friends online. And, the biggest thing of all… my TV works. During COVID I watched all the Stargate TV. I muttered when the history was so badly off. I wanted to know what Daniel Jackson’s PhDs were in and how they gave him such an ill-balanced understanding of history.

One of my many bugbears with the show was that it would have been nice to have at least maybe one or two Jews in the ancient Middle East. Stargate helped me see where some bigots get their bigotry from. If all they know about ancient history was first presented to them by Stargate or something like it, then they do not see our world, but a fictional universe.

And I’m off-topic. I was going to talk about how that COVID suggestion led to me watching much Star Trek. When I can do all my regular work, I watch less. When isolation pushes me towards cliff edges, I watch more. I argue about the world building with myself, and use the stories to help understand why we got where we are.

I always used to do this, but I’d watch or read whatever it was my writing and history students needed to know and find ways through popular TV to get them to analyse. I so miss that. But locally, no-one wants me to teach or talk anymore. This means that the thing I do best – help people understand the cultural and social basis of their own decisions – is one of the things lost unto me because I’m too Jewish and not physically robust.

The other day I emerged from hiding a little and asked people if they had more sources for what’s happening in Israel/Gaza so that I could balance out what I was learning. The main critical sources I have access to are all from pro-Israel analysts. I can (and do) pull them apart and make sense of them, but I’ve not been able to find anything nearly as solid in the analysis of data from anywhere else. Instead of giving me more sources, so that I could balance when I knew and be fair in how I see things… I lost friends. I don’t know what they saw and why my request was so impossible (they didn’t tell me), but from my end I was using my teaching methods on myself. I asked for more sources so that I could compare language and belief, look for patterns of speech, check where terms come from and how they’re used, and, above everything, when people claim this or that, drill down and find the source of the numbers and the origins of the claims, and pull them to pieces and balance them with views from other places and in other languages. Add to this checking the path ideas travel, for instance, find a translation of an article in Al Jazeera in Arabic and then compare it with the English version.

From my perspetive, anyone who makes claims about happenings at the other side of the world without doing this is doing what writers do when we world build lazily. When we world build lazily, we draw on our preconceptions of a place and time or a type of book and build up from there. This is why there is a shortage of ancient Jews in Stargate. And it’s why I’ve been accused (personally) of genocide and other things.

I can deal with the illnesses, even though they have entirely changed my everyday. I cannot deal nearly as well with people who are bright, yet will not question and try to understand how things happen, and who blame me for their own lack of thought.

I could have just said at the start of this post, “Oh, how I miss teaching!” but the reason I miss teaching is fairly important. These things are, I admit, difficult. My Richard III class at the Australian National University was both loved and hated . I got hold of such a range of primary sources for the last 3 years of his life, and the whole course comprised of students learning about the nature of the sources and pulling them apart, and then crating their own arguments on whether Richard was good, bad, a demon, a human being… whatever they wanted… as long as they could convince the rest of the class. It was an extension class, so the only result they had was their fellow students’ approval. The class felt that there wasn’t enough class time, so adjourned to coffee or dinner nearby and argued for two more hours. This is the polar opposite of conversations that cannot ever happen.

Maybe I need to return to watching TV.

personby Madeleine Robins
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I am re-reading a book that was published in 1969 (Rumer Godden’s In This House of Brede*). As I was enjoying the things that go along with a re-read (the comfort of a known plot which allows you to sink into the characters, renewed enjoyment of the writing, discoveries of things you slid past on the first readings) I realized that I was also reminded of the way the books of my youth were made, which is different from the way they are generally made today. Lemme ‘splain.

For eight years I was the Operations Manager at the American Bookbinders Museum. In practice, this title included a bunch of functions including Design Department, Chief Docent, Rental Manager, and Covid Czar–but the important thing is that I learned to look at the objects which had been, for my entire life, vessels for story. Looking at this book (which is a decommissioned library book with WITHDRAWN stamped on the inside cover, still in its mylar jacket cover) it’s… elderly. Probably the same vintage as many of the books I took out of the library when I was a teenager: full “adult size” books from the Adult section of the library (this one is the 6″x9″ trim associated with the top of the publisher’s list–what the publisher believes will be important and sell well, as Brede did). And it swivels a little because the binding has loosened over the years.

Until the advent of paperbacks, books (almost all, at least in the Western world) were sewn. In the photo on the right you can see the stitches at about 1″ intervals. (Here’s a good description of the anatomy of a sewn book, from the Princeton Public Library). The structure of a book is meant to keep all the pages together in the correct order, safely. Sewing signatures (or gathers) into a larger text block, was the way this was done for a thousand years. Most sewn books have a hollow spine (which is to say, the sewn spine is flexible, and the spine cover “floats” above it to protect the spine without making the structure more rigid. Then came the paperback, where the pages are glued together in a block. This has some serious benefits, but paperbacks are ephemeral. Granted, I still have paperbacks I stole borrowed from my parents that were published in the 1950s, but most paperbacks were not expected to live very long. Their structure did not hold up (when I worked in Production at Tor Books we would get letters calling us uncomplimentary things because eventually the spines of really thick paperbacks would begin to split or separate–this was a function of the process and the glues then available).

Then, in the mid-late 1990s, the technology changed. The glue used in “perfect” binding (that’s what paperback bindings are called in the trade) improved hugely. Wonder why trade paperbacks suddenly went from being a rarity to being a dominant format? It’s because suddenly you could do a trade-sized book at a price that was much more buyer-friendly, without the fear that the latest Big Horror (or Fantasy or Biography) Book would fall apart while you’re reading it.

So picking up In This House of Brede and really looking at it was a bit of a time capsule for me. The original purpose of books–all books–was as a container for information. Vessels, as I said above. You wanted to protect the information and keep it organized so that you can move back and forth as needed (the codex form on which the modern book is based makes that easier than the earlier format, the scroll). And you wanted to be able to keep that protected information out of the hands of the people you didn’t want to have it, whether because it would give them an advantage, or because you didn’t think they were worthy of it. The information in those books–whether it was an epic poem or a history or an alchemical formulary–had value. By the time this particular book was published, the point was not to keep this story or any other out of the public hands–it was to make it widely, broadly, lucratively available. The shift in binding technology helped with that. (But I can still pick up this book and sniff it and be transported back to 14-year-old me at the library.)

There’s a lot of agitation in certain quarters about keeping information out of the hands of… oh, children, or innocents, or people who think. Everyone. I’m hoping that technology–the genie that’s been let out of the bottle–will make that impossible in the long run. Fingers crossed.

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* I have, for all my total lack of religious background, a fascination with monastic practice and life. Don’t ask me why.

 

On Drinking Vessels

personby Gillian Polack
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Today I’m thinking about how we allocate meaning to objects. This is not a great theoretical thing. Specifically, I’m thinking that most writers I know will say “My character needs a drink” and allocate something to drink from. That something fits the world of their novel. If the character (let’s call them ‘Fred’) drinks ale, they may use a tankard. If Fred drinks wine, then a wine glass. Whatever they drink from tends to reflect the society they’re in. If Fred is on a space station, drinking something terribly celebratory and ancient, then Fred might gingerly unwrap the ancient wineglass, stop to admire it and to consider their five times great-grandmother who owned it in the 1950s and sip ordinary wine from it. The wine takes on attributes because of the vessel it’s drunk from.

From the author’s view, then, mostly it’s easy. What is Fred’s culture? When and where does Fred live? What important information does the drinking vessel communicate? Does the reader need to know that Fred’s wine drinking habit goes back nearly two hundred years, or does he just need to assuage his thirst? We write – in an ideal world – what we need the reader to see.

When I see a vessel as historical because it’s in a museum display case, I do what the reader does. I will check the card describing its origin and where it was found and then insert myself into its history. I am the reader. The person who wrote that card (‘Sheila’) gives it the context a writer does. Before Sheila, that glass had a quite different life. If Sheila chooses it to illuminate life in the Middle Ages and the glass is from the twentieth century (like Fred’s) then we have a clear and present misinterpretation. Even if the date and place are entirely correct, however, we’re liable to misinterpret. (and this next bit is a description of an actual exhibit in a very real museum) For instance, what if Sheila includes the glass as an example of daily life in an exhibition about the people of a specific city from the Middle Ages to about 1700? Obviously, she’s telling us that the epople in the city used glasses like this. And if the exhibition only showed Christian spiritual objects for the most part, she’s insinuating that religious Christianity is the main drive of life in that city.

But what if, historically, that glass was owned by someone Jewish? That focus on Christian religious iconography and that small space for everyday life implies otherwise unless she notes on the card “Most of this exhibition plays no part in the religious life of 20% of the inhabitants of those town. This glass was owned by one of those 20%.” That card might still be drowned out by the many rooms of religious art, but at least that one object points out that, just because most people thought this thing doesn’t mean that everyone did. It also helps people see that we attribute meaning to an object. That glass might be on my mother’s dinner table or lost in space, but ti’s still capable of being drunk from by quite different people. We allocate meaning. When we’re bigots, we allocate meanings that exclude or that even hate.

What does this mean for novels? Fred’s glass might belong somewhere different entirely. We only know what the novelist tells us. And if it’s an historical novel set in a place with a significant Muslim or Jewish community (say, a particular part of London, right now) and there is no indication of that in any of 200 noels by 150 writers, then when we read about Fred, we leave out actual people from actual places and times.

When most of the people who talk about Jews without checking our history, who talk over Jews, who tells us the world would be better if we were invisible, read novels, their view that Jews don’t have a history and should not have voices is confirmed. If someone Jewish then walks down the street and the reader sees them, they’re seen as exotic. That wine glass has helped remind the reader that Jews are exotic and alien.

If Fred is a woman and we use the world built by the people who wrote the 1960s (original) version of Star Trek, then the glass would be held by someone very feminine and with little agency. Even the most senior woman on the Enterprise is scripted as having little agency. That glass reminds us that she’s not permitted to serve herself wine, nor to break the glass and use the sharp shards to save the lives of everyone on board the ship.

In our lives, objects are not neutral. We assign meaning to them. Story matters, because story gives us that meaning. If 200 books with a setting where Jews lived do not contain Jewish characters then it’s worth looking for books that do. When women lack agency and plot points don’t hinge on them, find books where women matter. This applies to so many of us. We all tend to accept that novels and TV and film are about certain types of people only, that gender and size, and skin colour, and shape, and religion, and class, and agency, and even shoe size are all pretty standard.

However, that wine glass in that exhibition is never culturally neutral. Nor is our reading. When we ourselves walk down that street, we carry all this with us. We use it to navigate how we talk to people and what we talk about and how we judge them and what place in our lives we assign to them. Right now, Judaism is part of my awareness partly because I’m assigned to being outside the lives of many people I once knew, because one does seldom invites Jews to dinner or to walk in the park right now. My relationship to that wine glass has, then, been shattered entirely. My once-friends’ relationship with the glass has also been changed: no-one Jewish drinks out of any glass at their dinners.

Every single one of my novels asks about what baggage we carry in some way. For example, Poison and Light and The Time of the Ghosts are about women doing exciting things. Both novels contain Jews living lives with meaning. The Art of Effective Dreaming is about how we carry such knowledge and how we can change it if we want to. Langue[dot]doc 1305 questions where our interpretations of the world come from. The problem with writing such books is that a glass can never just be a glass in my mind. I need to know more about every place and every time, and I don’t need one bit of information about that glass.. I need to start off with a dozen. Then I can choose the one I need for that character at that point in time in that novel. My example of how that operates is in The Time of the Ghosts. Three women drink three cups of coffee. Each coffee reflects who the character is, and even the cups they drink from are quite different. One carries the cultural baggage of not questioning where things come from and accepting stereotypes, while the other two celebrate who they are.